If the sun rises in the West, put your compass to the test!
At the end of the 8th century BC in Greece, there lived a poet whose name is now known all over the world, yet about whom no one knows anything for certain: Homer (Homeros in Greek), author of the fantastic epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. Research has shown that Homer was a native of Asia Minor, and was probably a wandering singer or minstrel. He is also said to have been blind. What remains a mystery is where this blind minstrel got the framework for his stories, the “inside information” for his ambitious tales. The Iliad and Odyssey consist of 28,000 verses—not bad for a blind poet. Greek poetry is considered to have begun with Homer; he stands “at the beginning of Greek literature, and with him begins the history of the European mind.”1
Even Homer did not simply fabricate his tales out of nothing. Experts believe that the written versions of his epics followed a long oral tradition, and that at its core a “very ancient folktale tradition” is hidden.2
And what is the subject of this “very ancient folktale”?
In the Iliad are described battles, curious weapons and the deeds of heroes, in which both gods and men participate. We read in the eighth canto of “flying horses” which fly back and forth “between the earth and the star-strewn heavens.” These divine beasts remain invisible, thanks to a mist or fog. The ruler of the sea, Poseidon, is transported over the water by a team of flying horses, so that not even the axle of his chariot touches the waves. I’m rather partial to such fairy tales. Of course the whole thing has to do with love, offended honor, and—to a lesser extent—with the Trojan War itself.
Things are different in the Odyssey. Here we read of the hair-raising adventures of Odysseus. With his fellow warriors, he finally conquers Troy and, after 20 years, eventually returns to his homeland of Ithaca. The whole epic revolves around Odysseus himself: he tells the story in the first person, of the blows of fate which the gods have seen fit to aim at him, but also of his own heroic deeds and tricks which enable him to survive. Philologists regard Odysseus as an “ancient figure of legend.”3And the whole story is of course “in the nature of a fable.”4 For a long time, no one thought that it could be based on actual events—until Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90), with Homer in his hand, discovered the city of Troy. But we will return to that.
I don’t wish to analyze the Odyssey as I did the Argonautica. There is enough written about it already. But I must give a few points of reference for understanding this earth-shaking story.
Odysseus (in Latin Ulysses or Ulixes) is the king of Ithaca. He and his companions set off to conquer Troy, because the beautiful Helen of Sparta had been “abducted” and taken there. On the way home, Odysseus’ fleet, which starts out as 12 ships, meets one adventure after another. First the heroes are blown onto Cape Malea, then they land on the island of the one-eyed Cyclops. One of these, Polyphemus, imprisons Odysseus and his companions in his cave, and eats two of them each day. Finally, Odysseus manages to blind the Cyclops’ eye with a red-hot stake and to escape with the rest of his crew. (It should be mentioned in passing that the Cyclops asks Odysseus his name, and that he lies, saying his name is “No one.” After he is blinded, Polyphemus calls his fellow Cyclops to help him, and cries out “No one has done this to me.”)
Odysseus and his crew then have to deal with the allure of the Sirens and with the lady magician Circe, who turns the whole crew into pigs. After this Odysseus visits the realm of Hades—the underworld of the dead—where he may speak not only with his dead mother but also with other famous figures who have long since departed this life. Finally the ship has to pass between two female terrors, Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis is said to have once been hurled into the sea by a bolt of Zeus’ lightning, and since then, three times a day, she sucks down huge amounts of water and spits it out again. Her sister Scylla is no less daunting. She is described as a doglike monster who grabs passing sailors and slowly eats them. She snatches six of Odysseus’ men straight away.
The remaining crew reach the island of Trinacria, and, because they are hungry, slaughter some cows. Unfortunately, though, the beasts belong to the Sun-Titan Hyperion, who complains furiously to Odysseus and then blasts both ship and crew to smithereens with a single lightning bolt. Only Odysseus survives. He grasps hold of a few planks and is washed up some days later on the island of Ogygia, which belongs to Calypso, who, in spite of her beauty, dwells in a cave. She pampers and spoils Odysseus and begs him to remain with her, offering him immortality in return.
For seven years Odysseus enjoys the good life, but finally has enough of being endlessly kissed and feted. Sadly he sits on the shore and dreams of his homeland. Then Hermes flies by and orders Calypso to release Odysseus. He is given the tools necessary to build a raft, and sails away on it from Calypso’s love-nest. But the sea-god Poseidon, whose son, the Cyclops, had been tricked by Odysseus, tears over the waters on his winged chariot and knocks Odysseus overboard. If he hadn’t managed to pull off his heavy clothes under water he would have drowned.
Two days later he is thrown up, exhausted, on the shores of the island of Drepane. After a short stay with a swineherd, and with the help of divine intervention, he finally reaches Ithaca after an absence of 20 years.
This is the broad outline of the epic. Because there are many geographical details in the Odyssey and the Iliad, just as there were in the Argonautica, scholars asked themselves where Odysseus had journeyed.
In which sea did his adventures take place? Where are the islands that are mentioned? Where are the dreadful dangers of Scylla and Charybdis located? More than 100 different opinions were expressed, and about 70 maps drawn, and each researcher was sure that he had traced Odysseus’ journey correctly. Depending on which version you choose, Odysseus circumnavigated Asia Minor, sailed round the British Isles, or even went as far as South America. It has also been suggested that the Odyssey and the Argonautica were one and the same journey, or that Odysseus’ wanderings took place somewhere other than on Earth.
The most sensible suggestion comes from the German brothers Hans-Helmut and Armin Wolf. They succeed in reconstructing a route in which the time taken on the journey corresponds to places along the way. The authors, however, do not claim that “the Odysseus of legend visited this or that place,”5 but only that the sea journey which Homer describes can be clearly related to a route through the Mediterranean. Although the result of their long years of research is certainly consistent and convincing, I wonder how the blind Homer could have known the route with such accuracy.
In the Odyssey, the island of Crete is also mentioned by name, though without any reference to the robot Talos. Did Homer know the Talos from the Argonautica or not? Or did the robot seem too far-fetched to him? I can hardly believe that, given the other “fantasies” which appear in the Odyssey. Homer attributes all imaginable kinds of magic arts to the gods, including Poseidon’s flying chariot, but there is no mention of the Golden Fleece. In spite of all the hocus pocus which the gods indulge in, the Odyssey does not contain any science fiction in Argonautica style.
Troy is at the center of the war described in the Iliad, and the one place which does not form part of the geometrical network of ancient Greece. Was it not included in the ancient routes of the gods? However, the fate of Troy is described by all ancient Greek historians, and the siege is meant to have occurred between 1194 and 1184 BC. Troy must be very ancient, for the city’s name is derived from that of the mythical hero “Tros” (father of Ilos, grandfather of Laomedon, great grandfather of Priam of Troy). Originally the city had other names: Ilium, Ilion, and Troas. Apollo was also said to have helped in building its Cyclopic defenses. Troy therefore has just as “mythic” an origin as the many other sacred centers in Greece that we have already mentioned. So why did the geographical position of the excavation site which is nowadays thought to be Troy not correspond with the geometrical network of the gods? Is the Troy which Heinrich Schliemann discovered not the same as the Troy of mythology?
Agamemnon also figures in the Odyssey, and is said to be buried with several of his companions in Mycenae which, unlike “Troy,” is part of the geometrical network. This gives me some pause for thought.
According to legend, the region around Troy was once ruled by a Cretan king called Teucros. His people were the Teucrians. But then the lonely king’s son Dardanos arrived and founded a small settlement.
The region was soon called Dardania (the Dardanelles) after him, and because his son was called Tros, the settlement was also named Troas or Troy. Because Tros’ eldest son bore the name Ilos, the citadel on the hill was also called Ilion or Ilios, which gave rise to the name of Homer’s poem the Iliad.
Modern legend has it that Heinrich Schliemann came with the Iliad in his hand to rediscover this ancient city. Of course, I’m fond of tales like that: someone claims, against all expert opinion, that Homer’s battle of Troy really took place, and that its heroes were real. And then he actually finds Troy too. Great! Unfortunately this story is not quite correct.
Heinrich Schliemann was born on January 6, 1822, in Neu-Bukov (Mecklenburg), the son of a poor minister. By the age of 10, he is said to have written an essay in Latin about the Trojan War. In 1836, he began a business apprenticeship, and five years later he sailed for South America as a cabin-boy on the small brig Dorothma. The ship was wrecked and the survivors were taken by lifeboat to the coast of Holland.
In Amsterdam, Heinrich Schliemann became a clerk, on an annual salary of 15 dollars. He was regarded as being very careful with money, extremely hard-working, and with an outstanding memory. Once he had mastered Dutch, he turned his attention to English and French. Later he learned other languages, including Russian and Greek. By the age of 25, Schliemann had become a financially independent business agent, and in 1847 founded his own firm in St. Petersburg. In Russia, he achieved great success with the sale of indigo, sulphur, lead, and saltpeter, assuring himself a secure income after only a few years. By chance he was on a business trip to California on July 4, 1850, and thus “automatically” became an American citizen (for on this date of its founding, the new United States gave citizenship to all who happened to be on its territory).
From 1858 onward, Schliemann made regular trips around the globe. Enamored of his Homer and absolutely convinced that the Troy described in the Iliad and the Odyssey must once really have existed, he made Athens his home in 1868.
Because he didn’t want to bring his Russian wife to Greece, he got divorced and advertised in the paper for a native partner, finding one in the shape of a lovely 19-year-old girl. Faithful to Homer, he christened his first child Agamemnon. Schliemann, who by now had more than 10 million marks in capital, continued his travels until…well, until he found Troy. But this discovery was by no means as straightforward as we are led to believe by popular biographies.
Just over 2 miles (4 km) from the Dardanelles, on territory which today belongs to Turkey, stands the hill of Hissarlik, no more than 4 miles (7 km) from the Aegean coast. The hill has strategic importance, for every ship that wishes to enter the Dardanelles region must pass it first. The ancient Greeks called this place the “Hellespont,” because it was the spot where the daughter of King Athamas, Helle, plunged from the Golden Fleece into the sea. Both the Greeks and later the Romans suspected that Homer’s Troy was somewhere near here, and perhaps under the hill of Hissarlik. Just over 2 miles (4 km) south of this hill lies the village of Bunarbaschi, and this is where experts of the last century searched for Troy. The inhabitants, however, claimed before Schliemann arrived that these experts were on the wrong track, and that Troy lay beneath the hill of Hissarlik. It was this very controversy that caused the Anglo-American Frank Calvet, who worked as a consular agent both in Athens and Istanbul, to buy the rights to Hissarlik. Frank Calvet was there before Schliemann, and also started excavating before him, in an amateur kind of way. He hoped to persuade the directors of the British Museum in London to back a bigger excavation, but they refused.
In Athens, Schliemann heard of Calvet’s intentions, and set off to buy the hill of Hissarlik. The millionaire Schliemann met up with the globetrotter Calvet, and the latter was quite happy to give up Hissarlik, together with all the bother it had caused him. When news of the discovery of gold treasure in Troy emerged later, Calvet no doubt kicked himself. Schliemann was certainly a sharp operator, and this was proved in the following years. He was his own best public relations man.
After making the deal with Frank Calvet, several months passed before Schliemann got permission from the Turkish government to start digging at Hissarlik. Finally on October 11, 1871, with a team of 80 workers, the excavations began. Schliemann worked incredibly hard, and even the increasingly cold weather didn’t hold him back. He lived in a block-hut with his wife, who tolerated all the discomfort, even though she found the icy wind very hard to bear.
Not until June 15, 1873, did a digger’s spade knock against a copper vessel, one filled with golden and silver objects. Schliemann let his workers take an unaccustomed break, and hid the gold treasure in his wife’s headscarf. Inside the block-hut he arranged the find, placed a golden diadem on his wife’s head, and telegraphed the whole world to say he had found the “treasure of Priam.” Naturally some people got annoyed; the Ottoman government accused him of having stolen articles of value from Turkish soil, and envious opponents claimed that he had buried the gold there himself.
Schliemann surmounted every obstacle with his financial power and powers of persuasion. He dug down through layer after layer, and the question was soon not whether he had found Troy but which Troy he had found. Was it Homer’s Troy?
He smuggled the supposed “treasure of Priam” out of the country and donated it to the museum of “pre- and early history” in Berlin. The Russians took it from there to the USSR in 1945 as war booty, and claimed to know nothing about it for decades. Since 1993, the Russians and Germans have been in discussion about the treasure, as has the Turkish government, which would like to open a museum containing the finds at the present tourist site of Troy.
Did Schliemann really find the mythical site of Troy, that city which Homer spoke of in the Iliad and the Odyssey? No one is quite sure. Homer’s Troy must have been a mighty city, a place full of educated people, where people knew how to read and write, and where there were temples to the different gods.
Archaeologists have dug their way through 48 layers and found nine different “Troys”—but nowhere did they come across even the smallest tablet bearing the city’s name. The only text that was discovered there is engraved with a few Hittite hieroglyphs. It is therefore assumed that Troy was not an “early Greek city, but belonged to a different cultural milieu”6that is a Hittite one. This would also explain why Troy was not part of the geometric network of the Greek gods.
Schliemann, however, found nothing but confirmation of his belief. As a gateway was freed from the rubble, he immediately said this was the gateway mentioned by Homer, when he describes how Achilles (of the famous “heel”) chases his opponent Hector three times round the city walls. The foundations of a larger building were for Schliemann the “palace of Priam.” And in 1872, he thought he had discovered the “high tower” which Homer briefly mentions in the fourth canto of the Iliad. Later it turned out that this “tower” was nothing more than two insignificant parallel walls, and that his “palace of Priam” was no larger than a pig-sty. (According to Homer, this palace had 50 bedrooms, halls, and courtyards.) Nor, apparently, could the gateway have been the one mentioned by Homer. In other words, on cooler reflection, Homer’s text could not be made to correspond with the interpretation which Schliemann had imposed on many of his finds.
Shortly before he died, Schliemann himself came to doubt whether he had really discovered Homer’s Troy. We are still not absolutely certain to this day. His friend and successor in the excavations, the outstanding archaeologist Wilhelm Dorpfeld, pointed out various discrepancies to him. In regard to Mycenae, where Schliemann later dug, he is said to have taken his mistakes with good grace: “What?” he called out once, “isn’t this Agamemnon’s corpse and treasure after all? Good! Let’s call him the mayor instead!”7
Since 1988, an international team led by the Tubingen Professor Manfred Korfmann has been responsible for the excavations at Troy. No summer passes without some new sensation. The 90 experts or so from different faculties and countries soon ascertained that the hill of Hissarlik was inhabited without a break from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC up to Roman times. Even the lowest layer of all, called Troy I, had an 8-foot (2.5m) thick defensive wall with three gateways. The next layers—Troy II and III—contained the remains of living quarters and terraces, as well as bronze and gold artifacts. In layers IV and V, dated 2100 to 1800 BC, the Trojans don’t seem to have had a very rosy time—at least if the remains of their meals are anything to go by. There were also signs of several fires.
Troy VI was the biggest, and its date of 1800 to 1250 BC ought to make it the Troy of which Homer wrote. The excavators believe, however, that the city was destroyed by an earthquake. On the other hand, Troy VI did have several palaces, and a defensive wall that was longer and thicker than that of its precursors. But there were no signs of a fierce war such as Homer describes. There ought to be any amount of arrow and spear heads in Troy IV if this is where the famous war took place. One would also have expected to find engraved tablets, for by then writing was established.
Not until we reach Troy VII, dated at between 1200 and 1000 BC, do we find an insignificant little bronze tablet, 1 inch (2.5cm) long, engraved with some hardly decipherable “Luvic” hieroglyphs—a language related to Hittite. It seems to have been the seal of some trader. This makes it more and more likely that “Troy was in fact the same as Vilusa,”8 as Birgit Brandau writes in her excellent book on the current state of excavations.
Image 36: This wooden Trojan Horse was made for tourists.
Image 37: The alleged site of ancient Troy. However, this was built on a very small scale; what is lacking is monumental, massive construction.
Image 38: The alleged site of ancient Troy.
Image 39: This theater, too, which dates back to the 4th century BC, is not much more than a village stage.
Image 40: In comparison with Troy’s walls, here is part of the Cyclops Wall at Delos.
But what is Vilusa? It was a place in the Hittite kingdom also mentioned in Hittite traditions. So not Troy then? Or was Vilusa the Hittite name for Troy?
The layer of Troy VIII contained only insignificant remains from Greek times (roughly 950–85 BC), although this was the period in which the rest of Greece—the Acropolis, Delphi, and so on—flowered most extensively. Then finally there was Troy IX, which arose about AD 500. This place turned out to be the same as the Roman sacred place of Ilium.
Did Homer exaggerate shamelessly, or is Schliemann’s Troy not the same as that of the poet? But there was more than just the Hissarlik hill to be considered: there was also the region surrounding it. Eberhard Zangger is a geo-archaeologist—someone, therefore, who pursues archaeology from a geologist’s perspective. He turned his attention from the Hissarlik hill to the landscape along the coast, and started thinking. Then he read Plato’s story of Atlantis several times. Finally Zangger began counting, comparing, and bringing things together in his mind. The result was a book to which countless experts have responded with astonishing interest.9 Eberhard aims to prove in it that Troy was really Atlantis. A bit rich, one would have thought, to assume he had solved the riddle of Atlantis. If Troy and Atlantis were the same place, why does Homer always write about Troy and the Trojan War, never once using the word Atlantis? The American archaeologist Curtiss Runnels said of Zangger’s book that “it will have the same effect on the academic world as Schliemann’s discoveries 100 years ago.”10 And the British archaeologist Professor Anthony Snodgrass is convinced that Zangger’s comparison of Atlantis and Troy is sufficiently well founded to deserve the attention of many different specialist fields.
If Zangger is right, Atlantis-cum-Troy would not have been destroyed 9,000 years before Plato, but only about 1184 BC. Atlantis would also not have gone under in a single cataclysmic night, but would have been destroyed by the Trojan War. This is contrary to the evidence of Troy VI and Troy VII, which were not finished off by war or flooding but by an earthquake. Also Troy is on the hill of Hissarlik, and could not therefore have been submerged. So how can Eberhard Zangger equate Plato’s Atlantis with Homer’s Troy?
Zangger has his reasons. Whether they are really convincing is open to question.
The name “Atlantis” is well known, and for some represents a fascination, a dream, a paradise that never existed. Atlantis is like the miraculous world of childhood, a magic island of peace, a fairy-tale of a time when the world was happy and full of carefree people.
Is there more to it than just longing? Were Atlantis and Troy, as Zangger tries to demonstrate, really one and the same? What supports his ideas, what undermines them? If Zangger is wrong, does this mean that Atlantis is finally dead and buried? People have been theorizing for centuries about where it might be—and always in vain. Who started this Atlantis myth in the first place? What form did it take? Where does the original story come from?
